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Heritage classified

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Origin and history

The Gallo-Roman villa called Fount de Rome, located in Fleury, Aude, Occitanie, is a second-century building (High Empire), first reported in 1904 by J. Campardou. Stunned between 1966 and 1968 by J. Fabre, it reveals heterogeneous furniture and remarkable architecture: its walls, thick of 0.60 meters in some places, incorporate an exceptional quantity of shells (Cardium, Tapes) in their mortar, a rare technique in Languedoc. Classified as a Historic Monument in 1970, the villa consists of ten rooms on two terraces, some of which feature original structures such as a discoidal brick column or a concave apse room.

The villa, abandoned and invaded by a Mediterranean garrigue (Genèvrier cade, Ciste de Montpellier), did not deliver a visible pipe system, leaving its water supply mysterious. Among the furniture remains are bone needles, coins (including a denier from Manius Acilius, 54 B.C.), and ceramics, but no mosaic or tessela. In the vicinity, a potter's workshop (discovered in 1984) was reportedly linked to the villa, producing sigillated tiles, bricks and ceramics, now partially preserved at the museum of Ensérune.

Comparison with other regional sites, such as the Villa de Vivios (Lespignan), underscores the originality of Fount de Rome: unlike its neighbours, its walls do not contain Miocene fossils, but contemporary marine shells of builders, probably taken from a nearby beach. The excavations, interrupted in 1968 for undetermined reasons, did not clarify the exact function of certain rooms, such as the room with the "Greek Crosses" or the triangular one backed by the "Abside". The site thus remains an enigmatic testimony of the Roman occupation in Narbonnaise.

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